-McCain publicly acknowledged years ago that he behaved badly toward her.

– As Obama publicly acknowledged months ago that he behaved badly in associating with Wright.

-McCain took financial responsibility for his ex-wife, who has had many medical problems, after their divorce.

– Obama returned funding received from Wright.

-McCain’s ex-wife says only good things about him publicly.

– Publicly, Wright says only good things about Obama.

-One of the former Mrs. McCain’s children (by a previous marriage) is employed as an executive at the current Mrs. McCain’s beer distributing company.

– OK

Even if McCain is the world’s biggest jerk, and even if his ex-wife hates him (and none of us knows what the dynamics of his first marriage were really like), he is capable of admitting error and has taken responsibility for his behavior as best he could.

– As has Obama in regard to the original “throws his ex-firends under the bus” accusation that started this
thread. (admitted error and taken responsibility)

This is a flawed record but it also reveals some good qualities.

– Stet.

And McCain has stayed married to his second wife.

– Obama has stayed married to his first wife. (without a rich influential daddy as part of the deal)

On balance I would prefer him as President to Obama, who is arrogant,

– Arrogant like JFK, Martin Luther King, RFK, Reagan, Bill Clinton – all of whom were accused of the
same sin.

claims never to doubt himself,

– “I’m the deciderI” – W (whom you support? – So, which way is it? Self-doubt is good or bad?

speaks of “Minister Farrakhan,”

– And ‘Minister’ John Hagee? (McCain pal and supporter/fund raiser) A few qoutes: “Most readers will be
shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy
to exterminate the Jews.”

or

“All hurricanes are acts of God because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level
of sin that was offensive to God and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.”

is ignorant about history and economics,

– “For much of our history, the world considered the United States a young country. Today, we are the
world’s oldest constitutional democracy” – John McCain…Ummmm. I think that’s constitutional ‘Republic.’

and changes his positions with the opinion polls.

– Like on Immigration reform, abortion rights, global warming, windfall profit tax on Oil Companies,
off-shore drilling, Bush tax cuts, shut down of Guantanamo? – ALL McCain pandering waffles

This doesn’t mean that I like McCain, it means that I think he is the lesser evil. I would rather vote for someone like Phil Gramm or Steve Forbes, but that’s not the choice we get. As a wise man said,

“better a third-rate fireman than a first-rate arsonist. (from ’92?)

– A statement which completely contradicts Sowells’ premise that systemic processes mated to the common
wisdom and practical action of the ordinary volk are superior to the grandiose presumptions of
intellectual, political and bureaucratic elites.

You do admin. for a website that bills itself as being associated in actuality or ‘in spirit’ with the U of C. At what point would you cut off association? If the U of C put Hitler in charge of its econ. dept. would you change?

-I’m not running for high public office.

So the ethical point you’re making is that if you’re not planning to run for office feel more free to associate? If Ayers is unacceptable to associate with even tangentially shouldn’t the faculty of U of I resign and its students consider leaving? Shouldn’t failure to do so indicate an ethical lapse regardless of whether they choose to run for office at any point in the future.

Yes: Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan, et al.

Ayers and Wright we have exhaustively covered. Farrakhan I’ve asked you for specifics and have received nothing (if I missed it I apologize, please let me know the post #).

On Pfleger, this is what I get from scanning for his bio. He ran anti-drug campaigns in the 1990′s. Campaigned against tobacco and alcohol billborads, protested Jerry Springer & Howard Stern and got attention in 2000 for encouraging parishioners to ‘buy time’ with prostitutes to pitch counseling and job trainging with them.

I don’t exactly go for the moralizing nanny types but you can’t say campaigning against low-brow culture is all that radical…if so please document how McCain did not associate himself with GOP morals nag Bill Bennett. The culimination of Pfleger’s radicalism appears to be saying:

“I really believe that she just always thought, ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white, and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate.’ Then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama,’ and she said, ‘Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!’”

Leave aside the fact that Obama immediately rebuked the comments. The above is not all that radical of a position. A lot of people have said Hillary (and Bill) had a monster sense of entitlement. Do I think they were pissed that an unknown upstart like Obama stole what they thought should have been a cake-walk nomination? Sure. Do I think being black was an element? No but then again I don’t think it’s some type of evil offense for someone to believe that. We don’t really know politicians so we will always speculate to some degree about what goes on in their heads.

BUT here’s the problem…the real problem…Pfleger has nothing to do with Obama as far as I can see. I asked you:

Does Obama have a history of seeking out radicals to associate himself with?

Pfleger rushed to Wright’s defense and clearly supports Obama. I see nothing, though, that indicates Obama has any connect to Pfleger. Again, your case appears built around playing the six degrees game…

-The controversies surrounding Obama’s campaign make clear that the ’60s are not at all done. The leftist wing of today’s Democratic Party, which is now the Party leadership, remains eager to implement the New Left’s unfinished agenda of the 1960s.

You’re out of touch but this, I think, is going to just be a matter of disagreement not debate.

I don’t know much about Hagee but McCain’s relationship with him is marginal….

Indeed, there those goal posts go shifting again. Like I said, keep moving them so much and they will break and no one will take your rules seriously.

Been thinking about your posts and I think I can sum up our disagreement in a nutshell. You’ve been arguing that associations are a test of character. In that I can agree with you. Where we part, though, is I think you’ve mixed up a test of character with character itself.

A person might have lots of criminal friends because he is a criminal or he may be a non-criminal who just has friends who are criminal. What makes you a criminal, though, is whether you choose to commit crimes…not whether you choose to be friends with people who do.

To elevate association from just being a test of character (a test which, like all tests, may provide false answers) to being character itself is to make a serious error. It implies thoughts, actions, and beliefs make no difference…only your ‘associates’. To use a favorite hypothetical of yours, would David Duke suddenly become less racist and objectionable if he started associating only with non-racists but still kept advocating racism?

All these back and forth posts have, at best, pointed out that it’s valid to raise an eyebrow at Wright, perhaps at Ayers but I don’t think you’ve presented a case there…but a test is only a test. To judge one needs to see if the facts reinforce the results of the test or do they indicate the test gave a false positive (or false negative in the case of a hypothetical David Duke who suddenly tried to rebrand himself toting a posse of non-racist buddies).

In this, despite the strangely heroic efforts of methinks to spin Obama’s musing on growing up biracial as some type of Malcome X/Black Panther diatribe, the facts do not support the test results. Obama’s statements and actions do not conform to some type of black racist agenda.

Am I evenhanded? I hope so. I would say in response to your David Duke analogy yes I would say it would be possible for a white guy to be an associate of David Duke but yet not be a racist or even have a poor character. We are all flawed, though, so I won’t guarantee you that I’m perfectly unbiased. To the degree I’m not, though, that is a personal failing of mine and not a failure of the principle.

Yeah, thanks for making my point – that it doesn’t matter whether I give you citations or not, you will just call everything that doesn’t fit neetly into your image of the Obamessiah a lie.

Let’s again return to the student who submits a paper half of whose sources are fabrication. In the real world, such behavior gets an instant failure, probably a failure for the whole course and maybe even expulsion from the school. In Methinks world it means “just grade me on half of the stuff I was being honest about”.

Now I never said that all of the quotes from Methinks were fabricated. A few were accurate or somewhat accurate. When I didn’t have time to grab the book I admitted as such and was very clear about when I would have the time until a 3rd party (snopes) was able to confirm the truth of the quote making it unnecessary. I was the one that found the 3rd party source and brought it to everyone’s attention here, not Methinks. I could have easily had sat on it.

Here there is no matters of opinion. If you put something forth as a quote from someone it either is or isn’t. You can have different opinions on what that quote means but whether or not the quote appears in a book or speech or some other public record is an objective truth or falsehood.

Neither do I find Huffingtonpost to be a reliable source for unbiased information and reject it as lies

Blahhhhhaha, the lie poster will now tell us what she rejects as lies? I used the Huffingtonpost because they posted a transcript of Obama’s speech. The speech was televised on TV, carried by a huge number of newsoutlets. If you think their transcript was doctored it would be very easy to establish. Notice again how Methinks lives in a world of totally imaginary truths. A transcript is a lie because it came from the Huffingtonpost. In the real world a transcript would, could, only be a lie if it was not the actual speech given.

You should get your head out of your rear end and actually read your messiah’s work for yourself. I

Ahhh yes, Methinks has actually read the book! Isn’t it amazing then that she just happens to pick up the exact same quotes that have been making the basement level of the internet for months now….in the exact same order as thousands of spam emails and comments….and with the exact same mix of true and untrue quotes!

Look, if you want to be productive just do the following:

1. Be honest, if you don’t like Obama’s policies say so and say which ones. You invent all this crap, provide half-assed crap to back it up and when you’re called on it you pretend like it doesn’t matter. It does.

2. Live in the real world, not your imaginary one. Argue what people actually say or do. (i.e. accusing me of supporting Stalin)

Yes, all black people are the same. They are just a monolith of humanity. All of the same opinion and the same sameness. Interchangeable, even. Wake up and realize that your struggles are not those of an individual but the struggles of some pre-defined collective.

Actually that’s not what the quote says. There’s a difference between recognizing that you belong to a larger group of people without having to make that out to be some type of Borg-style collective. More to the point, it’s very clear now after we’ve seen more and more real passages and summaries of the book brought into the discussion that this quote was NOT Obama’s conclusion to the question of identity but just one argument along its way.

But I notice you seem to think that white people are monoliths of humanity….at least when it comes to their relations with blacks. I’m specifically thinking of your charge that Obama’s failure to feel the need to suck up to white people when he was a 12 yr old boy is an example of racism. As a white person, I speak for more than a few when I say I don’t want to live in the world where blacks must feel compelled to suck up to me and I don’t want to feel compelled to suck up myself to anyone for any reason. I think the only type of person who could possibly conceive of that as a good thing would be someone who doesn’t value the truth.

And really, that’s the problem Joyce had with the black groups on campus and the problem I have when feminists try to speak for me as a woman. My black husband is an individual and so am I.

Note what you missed by reading passages out of context:

it’sblack people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me that I can’t be who I am …”

They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black <people …

Notice Obama’s problem with Joyce was that while her multi-racial rhetoric sounded good it came at the expense of making black people into a monolith…Joyce had something nice to say about every white nationality in her bloodline but when it comes to blacks they are reduced to a ‘they, they, they.’

This is exactly what you are complaining about. Anyway, the passage is biographical. You have no idea who Joyce was or anything about her beyond what Obama wrote. That you see yourself in her shoes is only your imagination. For all you know, the real life Joyce is an insufferable political correct demonness. You complain about treating blacks as monoliths but you’re part of the problem. Obama can barely think “I’m black” without you jumping out of your seat pretending he’s joined the black panthers!

I have to say, if the comments on this blog are typical of how people in the Chicago area think about race I can only admire Obama for coming through this crazy house able to say sane things about the topic.

Duke is a despicable racist demagogue but AFAIK never engaged in violence. Ayers is worse because he planted actual (not “ideological”) bombs.

Have you disassociated yourself from the U of C for having Ayers on a panel discussion? Do you expect all students and faculty of the U. of Il at Chicago to resign or be considered associates of Ayers being that he has a teaching post there?

-I’m not associated with the U of C.

-I’m not running for high public office.

-I’m not telling anyone what to do. What I am saying is that the people Obama has chosen to associate with reflect on his character.

-I think the fact that the U of I employs Ayers reflects poorly on the U of I.

Does Obama have a history of seeking out radicals to associate himself with?

Yes: Ayers, Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan, et al.

His tangential contacts with Ayers are not exceptional among mainstream Chicago politicians.

True. This fact 1) reflects poorly on mainstream Chicago politicians and 2) makes Obama look worse.

Should Obama have gone out of his way to avoid Ayers despite the fact that Ayers, for better or worse, has been ‘forgiven’ by mainstream society. Maybe. To be honest IMO the 60’s are done and good riddance to them. I wouldn’t put up any serious effort to background check characters that I come into tangential contact with. I would expect more if Obama had choosen Ayers for a running mate or appointed him to positions. I would expect, then, that you hold McCain in equal disgust for his associations with characters like Hagee.

-If Obama wants to be President, yes, of course he should have avoided Ayers. The problem for Obama is that he wanted to have it both ways: to be a player in Chicago racial/leftist politics and also to run for President.

-The controversies surrounding Obama’s campaign make clear that the ’60s are not at all done. The leftist wing of today’s Democratic Party, which is now the Party leadership, remains eager to implement the New Left’s unfinished agenda of the 1960s.

-I would see Ayers as benign if he renounced his earlier radicalism and criminality. The fact that he not only hasn’t renounced them, but has recently publicly reaffirmed them, indicates to me that Ayers is as bad as he ever was and deserves no consideration.

-Ayers needs no background check. Everyone who runs in his circle, and this would have included Obama, knows who and what he is. Indeed his radical background is his main political credential.

-I don’t know much about Hagee but McCain’s relationship with him is marginal as compared to Obama’s relationships with Wright and the Chicago Left. More to the point, Obama has a short record in elected office, and his past pattern of association with racists and radical leftists raises questions about his real beliefs. McCain has a long public record on which he can be evaluated, and many fewer apparent contradictions to explain.

Would I sit with Duke? Probably not although if the function was policy making (such as voting on grant applications or such) I might consider sitting in order to counter his vote. I’m not convinced that Ayers and Duke are equilivant. Duke, last I heard, still likes to throw his ideological bombs…that’s a notch below someone whose unapologetic about throwing ideological bombs decades ago.

Have you disassociated yourself from the U of C for having Ayers on a panel discussion? Do you expect all students and faculty of the U. of Il at Chicago to resign or be considered associates of Ayers being that he has a teaching post there?

Two questions have been presented here about Ayers:

1. Does Obama have a history of seeking out radicals to associate himself with? Here your assertion has been disproven in regard to Ayers. His tangential contacts with Ayers are not exceptional among mainstream Chicago politicians.

2. Should Obama have gone out of his way to avoid Ayers despite the fact that Ayers, for better or worse, has been ‘forgiven’ by mainstream society. Maybe. To be honest IMO the 60′s are done and good riddance to them. I wouldn’t put up any serious effort to background check characters that I come into tangential contact with. I would expect more if Obama had choosen Ayers for a running mate or appointed him to positions. I would expect, then, that you hold McCain in equal disgust for his associations with characters like Hagee.

It’s simply that Obama “went along” (in the same sense of a “good German”) because of personal convenience or he was insensate to the problems confronting him. In a population held down by state assisted-welfare-poverty and crime he did not have the right combination (in whatever proportions necessary) of insight, wisdom, or courage, to expostulate the patterns of behavior that lead to a comfortable middle class life in this country. He went along with the radical Afro-centrist preacher and his poisonous socialist ideas that appear to have more to do with “victimization” than the ways of self-reliance and hard work that Christianity and capitalism entail.

Did Obama drink the kool-aid or was it a cynical political calculation that kept him in place all those years? Probably a bit of both, but either way I see it as “evidence” of poor leadership or no leadership at all.

Yes, all black people are the same. They are just a monolith of humanity. All of the same opinion and the same sameness. Interchangeable, even. Wake up and realize that your struggles are not those of an individual but the struggles of some pre-defined collective.

Good Lord.

My husband, son of Africa (naturalized only recently) needs to wake up and smell the collective, eh? And really, that’s the problem Joyce had with the black groups on campus and the problem I have when feminists try to speak for me as a woman. My black husband is an individual and so am I. Anyone who lumps us all together as an undifferentiated mass of women and blacks is a sexist and a racist, IMO. And I believe that’s pretty much the current widely accepted definition of those terms, no? Otherwise, “you people” would not be taken as a racist remark.

Yeah, thanks for making my point – that it doesn’t matter whether I give you citations or not, you will just call everything that doesn’t fit neetly into your image of the Obamessiah a lie. Even if the “fabricated” quote is from the Obamessiah’s own book and I even gave you a page number. And if it’s a matter of opinion, then yours is the “correct” opinion and any dissenting opinion is a lie. If you had your way, I might get kicked out of school (which, thankfully, I finished ages ago) for my take on Obama’s racism and I may even be sent to the gulags for a little re-education. Eh, Boonton? You’ve shown yourself to be quite the little tyrant.

You should show a little bit more respect here.

That’s rich since you admitted you never even checked the citations before screeching “lies”. Aren’t you supposed to stop by B&N tonight to do that? Plus, I reject your apologist “snopes” explanation (sad that you had to be fed an opinion) as valid. Neither do I find Huffingtonpost to be a reliable source for unbiased information and reject it as lies also. How do you like that? You don’t know the meaning of respect and it’s been a long time since you leftists lost my respect for you. You’re no different from radical right-wingers. Parlor revolutionaries.

You should get your head out of your rear end and actually read your messiah’s work for yourself. I have no respect for racist tyrants who wish to forcefully subject an entire population to their vision of the ideal society and who wish to further enslave the populace by making them more dependent to the beneficence of the state. That’s your messiah to a T. Been there, done that. No thanks. Don’t like my opinion of him? Tough. At least I bother to read his stuff and come to my own conclusions instead of letting Snopes do the thinking for me.

And you know what? After all your efforts to re-educate me, I’m still not voting for Obama. That’s what really chaps your leftist hides.

You ignored my questions. Would you sit on a board with David Duke? If so, then you do not understand reputation, or the fact that a reasonable person would question the character of anyone who voluntarily associated himself with an organization that selected a terrorist to sit on its board. If not, then you concede my point and are admitting that your objection to finding fault with Obama’s behavior is ideological.

Perhaps this is the culmination of your association game. Because Obama choose to live in Chicago his character is tarred by all slimy things in Chicago. If he was of good character he would have moved too and entered politics in a happy place where everyone was nice.

Since I’m already tarred a family hater might I ask why growing up in Chicago should make a difference? Last I heard serfdom was abolished, no one is tied to the land of their birth anymore. What type of character are you to be remaining in Chicago and associating with all its slimy people like a University that invites Ayers to sit on a panel discussion and teach? Are you under house arrest or being held hostage by Black Panters?

The problem with your Ayers argument is that Obama’s “association” with Ayers is trivial. “Sitting on a board with” is hardly associating in the sense that you’re trying to sell us on here. In fact, board members can be hostile enemies of each other….but usually it’s pretty mundane business of meeting and voting on various things.

I harp on the political correctness angle because this meme has a very authoritarian sound to it. Person X is written off as a non-person…the most evil of evil….totally unacceptable. Therefore Obama is guilty of thoughtcrime for any ‘association’ that wasn’t denounced in a prompt manner to the party! Don’t forget, I hate families because I don’t buy all the way into the exception clause for direct blood family members (adoptions don’t count I suppose?)

You talk about character but in good doublespeak fashion you’re actually dodging the character issue. You don’t want to address what Obama has really said about race, for example, you’d rather pretend Wright was the one running. So you use the association game to sweep Obama under the rug and ignore just about everything Obama has actually said, done and written in regards to race (except stuff that can be yanked totally out of context). This only works so much, keep shifting the goalposts and pretty soon they will break….

Ingratiating blacks.v.white

I don’t see any evidence of this in the material you posted or in what is available online. This smells of a ‘dammed if you do dammed if you don’t’ situation. If 12 yr old Obama made a point of telling people his mother was white he’d be attacked as a suck up, if he stopped telling people his mother was white he is being racist against whites.
He identifies as black and he’s spent his whole life trying to “be black”.

I don’t see evidence of this either. From his speech on Wright:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Likewise from his book (I found a site that confirms your quote but you left a lot out). Obama was attracted to the black image which culiminates with:

Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men — Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo [my adoptive father] and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own — my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!

But the anti-climax comes when he actually meets his father who he had idealized and reality hits:

Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/ownwords.asp

At this point I want to take a moment to note you’ve yet to produce any evidence that Obama was ever racist against whites except for the fabricated quotes you presented as real. You’ve shown us that a 12 yr old boy yearned to identify with his father. Wow, how shameful! You also showed us that a man who is half-black tried to identify himself as black (but you neglect to mention that he also found such identity to be deficient). You’re argument borders on being highly paternalistic here. You’re essentially saying Obama was/is racist against whites because he doesn’t feel like he needs to suck up to whites.

Incidentally, it really doesn’t matter if I provide references for you or not. As a typical apologist, you will either attack the source or you will explain it away via some pretzel logic.

There’s no need to explain anything way with pretzel logic. You posted lies, confirmed fabrications. As I said before, if you were a student at a reputable university who submitted a paper half of whose sources were fabrications you’d be drummed out on your behind (or at least should be). You should show a little bit more respect here. Because you took the lazy way out and cut and pasted your way to score a cheap point I’ve spent more than a little time untangling the truth from the untruth’s in your post. I’m not going to say I’m angry about it because it’s good to go hunting sometimes for original sources (at least as much as you can with Google) but that doesn’t diminish the irresponsibility on your part. The time you spent with lies could have been spent building a more intelligent criticism of Obama from your standpoint.

Post 57

What’s interesting is this confirms exactly what I said. Obama’s only praise of Wright is religious, “he helped me on another journey and introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. And I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things that I was too weak to accomplish myself, maybe he could accomplish them for me if I placed my trust in him. And I learned that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things when they believe in him and they come together and are guided by him.”…

I see nothing that supports your argument here at all.

If I missed any of the missing posts please let me know….

I don’t know. There are currently no comments from Methinks or Boonton in the spam queue.

Obama’s personal associations are important because they reflect on his character. The fact that he allowed himself to serve on the same board as Ayers, the fact that he did business with Tony Rezko, the fact that he had a long and apparently harmonious association with the odious Jeremiah Wright, the fact that he pays deference to the racist anti-Semite Farrakhan, and to the slimy Pfleger, are all huge red flags about his character.

Obama didn’t have to go along to get along in the corrupt Chicago political environment. He didn’t grow up in Chicago. He chose to live there, to join Wright’s church, to do business with Rezko, to pretend that Farrakan is a decent man, to participate enthusiastically in scummy Chicago racial politics. Those were his choices. They reflect strongly on him as a person and elected official. Your attempt to explain away his responsibility for them fails.